Homage to Richmond Barthé, and: Night Walk, and: After A Year Sober, and: Homage to Lyle Ashton Harris, and: To Sleep, and: The Age of Pleasure

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• Homage to Richmond Barthé, and: Night Walk, and: After A Year Sober, and: Homage to Lyle Ashton Harris, and: To Sleep, and: The Age of Pleasure
• Derrick Austin (bio)

Homage to Richmond Barthé

If Barthé’s Boy with a Flutehas completed his performance,eyes rising to meet the eyes of the one who listenedseated in a flowering grove,then, perhaps, the viewer is invited to partake of music and loose time.If, however, the boy has not begun playingin the flowering grove,or has refused to begin, the song remains metaphysicalbut turned inward, private, thus the viewer must attendto the bronze fact of his attenuated body, where his heart would be.

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“Truly it is a great thing to know of the rich heritageof this French-speaking nationand to learn we are all brothers under the skin after all,”Barthé said to a reporter in 1949,struggling with the Haitian president’s commission, [End Page 59] heavy with his mother’s death,desolate and money-troubled.

He hoped the muse would come courtingin a seersucker suit.

He wrote letters weekly (Chicago, New York City, New Orleans)inviting friends to sip a Campari spritzin his ramshackle estatenamed Iolaus, after the gay anthology, a wink and prayer.

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The humidity addles my mind like gin. Smoking a blunt,shells and glass crackling underfoot, I encounter a leg,

not human or beast—not beast anymore divorced from its body: a hoofhooded with mange. Like the eucharist, the leg represents nothing but itself.

Barthé appears beside a deer eating the sea grapes meant for jelly jars.When I offer him a hit, he refuses. When I offer my hand, he smiles and refuses.

The red mangrove he points to speaks like a minor prophet: My leaves glow with salt, [End Page 60] a fire that scalds but leaves me whole, a fire that does not warm nor console.

Perhaps, loneliness merely banks the flame where we can gather ourselves and each other.I exhale smoke. I feel light. Barthé steps and returns to the night. [End Page 61]

Night Walk

Near the cemetery, Callery pears stink like sex.How many eccentric bachelors ended a line?Someday, I will leave in my own lavender suit.

A drum circle pulses by the lake.An antiseptic moon illuminatessidewalks filmy with wild rose petals and pulp.

The world smeared pleasantly like a bad Monetwhen I used to drink. I wouldn’t have heardthese rustling cypresses making sea-sounds.

For five years I numbed my mind:gin for anxiety, mornings and afternoons,nips from a Sprite bottle in bathroom stalls.

“Alcohol can’t produce anything that lasts. It’s just wind,”Marguerite Duras wrote in Practicalities.Books don’t help me sleep, or gauzy French movies.

In Le Rayon Vert, Delphine is prickly and restless.I admire how she lashes out.Her honest feelings inconvenience others and herself.

Shame, cowardice, whatever happened, happened.Past the feral church with pink walls and no facadeand cruising men, I walk uphill. [End Page 62]

If not for the mountain on the horizoncalled Gray Beard for the shadow snow casts in winter,this swaying grass would go on forever.

Goatsbeard, meadowsweet, shieldleaf.The night is like the night in a ballad.I ramble in it, fearful but not helpless. [End Page 63]

After A Year Sober

In the second to last roomof the Margarita Azurdia retrospective—wallpaper with roses the size of cabbages—

there were two altars, handmade cabinetspainted in a thin layer of white,wood grain and the labor of painting

still visible, and where there would be glassin the doors instead is lacethat caught my breath when I peered inside:

plates depicting four-legged animalsin repose, candles, percussive instruments,oblong stones by a red clay bowl,

a print of Escrava Anastacia—santa, santa—after whom Azurdia rechristened herself:Margarita Anastacia made these works.

In the final room, her ritual dances with womenlooped on screens and their chantingwas like house music pulsing in the gay bar

where I first embraced my ungraceful limbsor like the tinny bells used in monasteries...